Opportunity to be part of world's largest IT project

Opportunity to be part of, and leverage off world's
largest IT project

There is still plenty of
opportunity for New Zealand and international companies to
be part of the world’s largest IT project.

New Zealand
may have missed out to South Africa and Australia for being
a location of hundreds of antennas under the $3 billion
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) initiative to better map the
universe.

“But the computing requirements and delivery
for the global initiative are still to be determined,”
says Nicolas Erdody, director of Oamaru-based company Open
Parallel, which participates at the Software Development
Environment work package within the Canadian Central Signal
Processor consortium.

“Many new computer and computing
technologies will need to be developed in order for the
telescope to be delivered and operated, and New Zealand
IT companies have the opportunity to be part of this effort.
The business that could result is immense.”

Erdody
is organising a Computing for SKA workshop at Auckland’s
AUT university on February 27 and 28 with Dr. Andrew Ensor
-Director of NZ SKA Alliance, and Prof. Sergei Gulyaev from
AUT. Computing for SKA is collocated with the III Multicore
World Conference, also at AUT and organised by Erdody's
company Open Parallel.

The use of multicore computers and
parallel programming will be vital components of the SKA,
and Erdody says that New Zealand companies, researchers,
academia and developer communities can be part of the
pre-construction phase up to 2016, and its delivery from
2017.

“The SKA is a good source
of defined needs, which over the coming years will be shared
by many industries across the world. For those companies now
trying to factor the swing to cloud computing and
e-infrastructure into their business planning for the
future, this is an opportunity to join the project and so
ensure the delivered outputs help them in their everyday
businesses.”

SKA Architect Tim Cornwell, from the SKA
Organisation (UK) will give the keynote presentation on the
four key factors in computing for the project.

John
Humphreys (Chair, Australasian SKA & Big Data Industry
Consortium) -who also speaks at the workshop, says: “SKA
can be seen as an excellent global project to extend the
boundaries of scientific-only endeavour, or as a catalyst
for ‘step-jump’ innovation that is led by the Big Data
story and the realisation of associated non-astronomy
opportunities”.

AUT’s Prof. John Bancroft’s talk
will focus on examples of possible opportunities for both
supply companies and potential new user communities to
leverage the SKA project and its outputs to their own
commercial advantage.

Erdody says New Zealand can leverage
off the big data opportunities from SKA.

“One of the
workshop’s main purposes is to address ‘what’s in it
for industry’,” he says.

“We need to be aware that
by being part of the design stage of SKA, individual
companies and New Zealand be in a much better position to
take advantage of the multicore computing changes about to
occur. To do so, and to tap into SKA’s promise, people
need to get to this
workshop.”

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